Black Music History Month, the Blues, and the Ongoing Struggle for Black Cultural Memory

On Jack Dappa Blues Radio, we discuss Black Music History Month through a cultural and traditional news lens. We are not simply celebrating Black music as entertainment. We are listening to Black music as testimony, archive, field report, ancestral memory, spiritual technology, resistance practice, environmental record, and survival map. This program connects Black Music History Month to the Blues People, Blues Ecology, Blues Narrative, and the ongoing reality of what we are calling the prison planet — the systems of confinement that have shaped Black life from the plantation and convict leasing to prison farms, policing, surveillance, displacement, and mass incarceration. Tonight’s central question: What has Black music been trying to tell the world all along?